D&D 5E Long Rests vs Short Rests

[Xeviat]

The issue with comparing to 4e is 4e's issue was more presentation than mechanics. A lot of the ideas of 4e were very good, but they were presented so....clinically....little power cards on white sheets that really did make you think of a card or video game. 4e I think had a bigger PR problem than a mechanics one. Doesn't mean it wasn't a big problem, I mean the fact that 4e's handbook reads like a textbook and 5e's reads like a mystical tome is a major improvement on the experience.

Now I think one thing 4e did miss was the idea of repeatable powers. 4e's slots were mainly at will, once per encounter, once per day. And once that power was used, it was used. I think the notion of "Prof mod per day or even per fight" is much smoother. I think people can get behind the idea they can't do a special something in a fight every round all the time, but there is a big difference between one time and never see it again in 5 rounds, vs using something 2 or 3 times.

I had a whole essay I wrote up on this once. The Warlock is very nearly a 4E character, with at-wills, encounters, dailies, and utilities, just built out of order.

Basically, my question here is how would people react if the bard, cleric, druid, paladin, ranger, sorcerer, and wizard were rebuilt on the warlock chassis instead of the warlock being built on its own. No one decries sameyness when those seven classes have the same skeleton; I'd be real curious to see how the game progressed differently.

 

[Flamestrike]

Mate, if you're not even going to be honest about your min-maxed Fighter being min-maxed, then that's not much incentive to get into a min-max battle with you is it?

How on earth is it 'min-maxed'?

It's literally a CRB/ Point buy Str18 Battlemaster Fighter with a 'Warlord' theme to the maneuvers selected (taken straight from the Battlemaster advice in Tashas) and its two feats are GWM and a Strength half feat!

It's not like I went out of my way here to create some Bizzaro Fighter, selecting Linguist or some-such.

It's Fighter - It's a Str 18/ GWM/ Precision strike/ Maneuvering attack BM Fighter, with all the DPR Goodness that that entails, plus containing the ability to buff/ manouver allies, that dominates the Social pillar better than a Rogue (+13 or so to Persuasion, +9 to Insight, Know your enemy) while being able to do a great deal in the Exploration pillar as well.

And you know what else? It can do it all day long, with its abilities coming back on a short rest.

What can Wizards do in the social pillar? Charm person? That simply grants advantage to Cha checks (and the Wizard likely dumped Charisma anyway) AND it angers the NPC after a minute anyway. Exploration pillar you can Detect Magic (situationally useful, but uses concentration) or cast Fly to get over obstacles (burning a precious 3rd level slot) and similar stuff.

All of which is resource intensive (high level slots or concentration), and meanwhile the above Fighter is STILL better than you in at will DPR with GWM, and all class features coming back on a short rest!

You keep discounting Fighters, when the problem isn't Fighters. It's just how you've seen them played. Players who play Fighters (or Barbs) generally dont care for much else other than 'hit things hard'. If they want to create PCs that dominate outside the combat pillar, they can easily. It's just that most choose not to.

 

[ph0rk]

How on earth is it 'min-maxed'?

Because at this point everyone (or everyone who cares to google it) knows that GWM+precision attack is the most broken DPR in the game.

 

[Flamestrike]

Because at this point everyone (or everyone who cares to google it) knows that GWM+precision attack is the most broken DPR in the game.

That's not what he considers broken. He agrees that Fighters win in the Combat pillar, and their DPR is top notch over that of a Wizard. He has no issue with the Precision/ GWM aspect.

His argument is that they (Fighters) suck in the Exploration and Social pillars.

Something I refute. They only suck in those pillars if you build them that way. There are plenty of tools at your disposal as a Fighter to not suck in those Pillars if you desire.

 

[Xeviat]

I made a thread with a proposed short rest caster chassis, a modification of the base warlock chassis: Short Rest (Spell Point) casters

I'd be curious to hear what people think.

 

[ph0rk]

That's not what he considers broken. He agrees that Fighters win in the Combat pillar, and their DPR is top notch over that of a Wizard. He has no issue with the Precision/ GWM aspect.

His argument is that they (Fighters) suck in the Exploration and Social pillars.

Something I refute. They only suck in those pillars if you build them that way. There are plenty of tools at your disposal as a Fighter to not suck in those Pillars if you desire.

Well, a fighter would never be a strong contender there, though.

Even if you keep things mundane, a rogue that chooses to will blow the doors off a fighter in either arena. If you include casters it is truly no contest.

A fighter can’t keep up in social or exploration stuff with other classes built for it, and other than a bm/pa/gwm or SS fighter (that is ridiculously far ahead of other fighters), the reverse isn’t true - lots of other classes can keep up with other fighters in damage while still besting them at exploration, social, or both.

Expertise and spells sort of ruin that stuff, and about the best a fighter can do is pick up both prodigy and skill expert, but other classes could do that too, on top of their other stuff.

I mean, a fighter might beat a barbarian with those feats, but a rogue? A bard? A wizard? No.

 

[Scott Christian]

In Tasha's, and in recent UAs, abilities that were or would have been previously X/short rest have been turned into Prof Bonus per long rest. This got me thinking about doing away with short rests as a recovery mechanic, since I've long been struggling with inter party balance between the likes of thr cleric/druid/wizard vs the fighter/monk/warlock.

But, as I was fiddling with things and working on new numbers for short rest abilities, the terror of the 5 minute work day, more Novas, and other fears from 3E started to come back to me.

This inevitably leads me to reconsider a project I had abandoned a while ago: converting the long rest recovery classes into short rest classes. What if the full casters used the warlock casting chasis, potentially tweaked a little?

What I'm wondering is would you rather have everything be all short rest (with some kind of daily timer like hit dice telling you when you really need to take a long rest), or would you rather have everything be all long rest (with hit dice for some short rest healing)?

No offense, but it doesn't need to be complicated. Just use a short rest for all classes and all abilities, and then when the players run out of HD to heal, they have to take a long rest. No work needs to be done. It won't break the game, and if you find it is really powerful, well then nothing is stopping you, as DM, to up the CR levels.

 

[tetrasodium]

Out of curiosity, how do you imagine one might go about making o a magic system that was more accurate to Vance?

How to implement a magic system would depend heavily on how the rest of the system works. Vancian is not the only way of having a system where magic feels magical, it's just one of the easy ways of doing that. You can look at dfrpg as an alternate example where wizards have incredibly powerful magic that is shockingly versatile alongside noncasters who because of the quirks of the system & point buy costs excel in their own areas in ways that leave both feeling good at the same table. That dfrpg magic system has the downside of being pretty complex to grasp by needing to really grok how fate works in order to leverage making it probably a bad fit for d&d without heavy reworking into fate.

Point of order: While a high-end caster can do a pretty good job of replicating or matching the power level of some of the Avengers, Captain America is more widely capable and powerful than a D&D fighter. Outside of maybe the sheer durability which is shared by all D&D classes.


Average damage of Level 11 longsword and shield fighter= 37.5.
OK. Well, I guess you might have got carried away with your claims and meant just the minmaxed Greataxe fighter, average damage (ignoring attack penalty, assuming same hit rate at the others): 64.5
Average damage of non-maximised Disintegrate (Not even bothering with the maximised thing: takes too long/too much luck to set up.): 75

I do not believe that either 37.5 or 64.5 "meets or exceeds" 75, let alone 100.
(In fact the Fighter would have to deal decidedly non-average damage, by kicking in their Action Surge to start comparing with disintegrate.)

Now personally, I do not think that this is a valid comparison: Disintegrate uses a high-level spell slot and is one of the worst example spells to start comparing combat performance with. But I wasn't going to let such an . . . unusual claim stand without looking more closely at its actual truth.


Pretty sure that it is not a valid comparison to start with, but it does hold up in both directions: Wizards do excel at casting spells: they do it much better than Fighters. (Or pretty much any other class due to the spell list and class/subclass abilities.)

The reason that I do not view it as a valid comparison is that extra attack and spellcasting cannot be compared directly in the game as a whole. You can compare greataxe damage compared to fireball on X targets for the combat pillar, but the fighter's Extra Attack is not going to help them with exploration, stealth, social, investigation, and other challenges the way that 3rd level spell slot is with the wizard.
In the time a fighter takes to get another attack, usable in only the combat pillar, the wizard has got three more spell levels and ten different ways of using them. Outside of a really combat-focused hack-and-slash style game, the two cannot be compared.

Or to put it to you in an even simpler way: Matching fighter attack damage with wizard disintegrate damage over the course of a day would still be unfair, because disintegrate has a good non-combat utility use as well, whereas weapon attacks don't.

I agree that disintegrate being a high level slot is a bad example for comparison, but being a high level slot that is so limited it shouldn't even be in the same realm as at will damage . I usually stick to other spells or cantrips for A:A comparisons & there's a tab with bas all of the cantrips plus a bunch of weapons & the results are pretty stark there as well. Here's a fighter with a prison break 1d4 dagger shiv they found vrs a generic d12 cantrip
[/spoiler]

[/spoiler]
That's a damage comparison that should stack up like the three stooges vrs a heavy weapon but it's nowhere close to that with the cantrip not even beating the prison shiv until you drop to 14/16 strength & even then it's barely pulling ahead. Things get dramatically worse when you start comparing weapons+feats & cantrips people actually use.

A lot of the comparisons I make deliberately try to stack things against the fighter like that absurd maximized lucky lucky lucky disintegrate & still come out with silly results like this with the dagger. The point isn't to argue over the numbers so much as show how far spells need to bridge the gap in nondamage areas

It's all well & good to say "Wizards do excel at casting spells: they do it much better than Fighters." While technically true it's not like fighters are limited to actor & dagger/short word because rogues like those akin to how wizards basically share the vast majority of their spell list with sorcerer/warlock/sorlock but cast them basically the same way unlike fighters getting extra attacks action surge etc.

Spells cast by those wizards need to stack up to being something on par with what kind of useful fighters bring to the average session game after game & they fall far short with cantrips likewise being such a joke that they are effectively a pointless contribution. the occasional This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman type situation where a niche spell is both available and basically by fiat declared the only solution doesn't make up the gap either.

 

[Flamestrike]

Even if you keep things mundane, a rogue that chooses to will blow the doors off a fighter in either arena. If you include casters it is truly no contest.

Post your 7th level Wizard that makes it a no contest please.

 

[ph0rk]

Post your 7th level Wizard that makes it a no contest please.

For exploration? Find Familiar, invisibility and greater invisibility, just for a start.